The 13th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale is again a huge glittering kaleidoscope. It dissects more or less everything that currently has to do with construction, space and the city into a greater or smaller number of aspects – both in the Giardini with the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the country pavilions and in the Arsenale and the various pavilions scattered around town.

What do architects do and what drives them in the process?
Where do they come against their limits?
Is their primary task to build new houses?
Should they concentrate more on maintaining, optimizing and re-using existing buildings?
Do buildings consume energy or can they produce it?
Is there a new architecture from below?
Can megacities even be planned?
What can we learn from other architectural cultures?
What political structures does architecture have to tackle?
Is public space increasingly becoming commercial space and what can be done to stop this?
Do projects that arise spontaneously change public and private spaces more than complex construction projects with their long planning lead times and difficult decision-making processes?
Must architects see themselves more as a collective than hitherto?
Can the forms of cooperation practiced at present counteract the tendency to isolation?

A truly dizzying number of questions and the list goes on. David Chipperfield, as Director of the Architecture Biennale and thus responsible for the central exhibition, therefore set out to tempt his colleagues onto common ground and encourage them to open their minds to the pending issues. Yet, those in the business evidently were not able to reach agreement so easily on what we should understand as the shared ground, the foundations of all building. What is certain, however, is that there are many projects, concepts, models, installations and images to admire in Venice, and that they point to some common ground even when this is simply not to be seen in the one or other project taking the limited angle of the common visitor.

13th Architecture Biennale Venice 2012
through November 25
www.labiennale.org